Chapter 85: The Form Nobody Looked For
He slept for eleven hours and woke up owned, and the first thing he did was go back to the office.
The queue was shorter on the fifteenth. Twenty people, no bench weather, the barley woman doing less trade and complaining about it to anybody who would stand still.
He took his place at the end of it.
"You were here two days ago," said the man in front of him.
"I was."
"Come out worse?"
"Yes."
The man nodded like somebody hearing the weather report he expected and went back to his own business, and Mataon stood in a queue in a foreign country and worked out that he was the only person in it who had chosen to be there twice.
The young clerk at the fourth counter recognised him and got the register out before he asked.
"Change of address?"
"No. I want the form."
"Which form?"
"The one for a subject who has cleared his maintenance line." Mataon put both hands on the counter, flat, the way he had learned to do when he wanted somebody to know he was not going to shout. "I’ve asked three people in Deuna about it now. A tallywoman on the road at Hemmet, a collector at the ford, and a man in a queue outside. Nobody’s ever seen it. One of them said, there’d be a form, for if they did. I’d like to look at it."
The clerk did not laugh, and did not explain, and did not tell him it was not his department.
"How much is your line?"
"Two thousand two hundred."
"Then you’re asking me for a form you’ll never use."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because somebody on a road crew nine days west of here will use it, in about four and a half years, if it exists." He kept his hands where they were. "And I’d like to know which of those two things is true before I go any further, and yesterday I couldn’t ask you and today I can."
The clerk looked at him for a moment.
"No," he said. "Yesterday you couldn’t ask me. You were pending. I’d have had to send you to the third counter and the third counter would have sent you out."
"And now?"
"Now you’re a subject of the roll, and a subject of the roll can ask about the terms of his own maintenance, and I’m required to answer or find somebody who can." He was already reaching for the shelf. "Sit down. It’ll take a while."
***
It took two hours and twenty minutes and involved three clerks, a supervisor, and a book from a locked press that had to be signed out.
There was no form.
There was a *procedure* — eleven lines of it, in a schedule to a schedule, under a heading about the discharge of assessed obligations. It said that on satisfaction of the line the office of record shall issue a certificate of discharge in the prescribed form.
"There isn’t a prescribed form," the supervisor said. She had been at it longer than the clerks and had gone slightly grey about it. "It says *the prescribed form*. Nobody prescribed one."
"When was this written?"
"Two hundred and eleven years ago."
"And nobody’s needed it."
"Somebody must have." She said it too fast, and then heard herself say it, and stopped. "I’ve been here nine years. I’ve never issued one. I’ve never seen one issued. I’ve never had it asked about."
"Can you make one?"
"No. Prescribing a form has to come from the centre."
"Can you ask them to?"
The supervisor put her hand flat on the open book, exactly the way he had put his on the counter, and he noticed that and filed it.
"Yes," she said. "A subject may raise a query about the terms of his own maintenance. It’s called a Subject’s Query. It goes to the office of record and the office of record has to answer it in writing inside sixty days."
"Has to."
"Has to. If it doesn’t answer, the query is escalated to the central roll with a note that the office failed to respond." She turned the page and read it again to be sure. "I’ve raised four in nine years. Three came back inside a fortnight. One took fifty-eight days and came back rude."
"Who is my office of record?"
The room changed temperature by about a degree.
The supervisor did not look at the seven characters, because she had them in front of her and had been looking at them all morning, and had presumably been not-thinking about them all morning as well.
"Yes," she said. "I see it."
"Say the rest."
"An office of record with no directory entry and no service address." She closed the book slowly. "We would have to write to it. We would have to write to it at an address, and there isn’t one, and if it doesn’t answer inside sixty days it goes to the central roll with a note on it saying so."
"And if the central roll asks where the letter was sent?"
"Then somebody in this building has to write down where we sent it." She looked up. "Which we can’t."
Mataon stood very still and did not enjoy the moment, and afterwards he was glad about that.
"I’d like to raise a Subject’s Query," he said.
They wrote it out in the afternoon.
He was allowed to state the question in his own words, and the supervisor read it back to him twice, and the second time she read it she did the thing Rethe had done. She slowed down at the parts that were hard instead of hurrying them.
*The subject asks: what is the prescribed form of the certificate of discharge, and where may it be obtained?*
Nothing else. No accusation. No mention of the ghost office, or the seven characters, or the four hundred and six instruments, or the forty-four names in a minute upstairs.
Just a man asking where a piece of paper is kept.
"That’s a small question," the supervisor said.
"It’s the smallest one I could find."
"You could have asked six others. Bigger ones. I’d have had to write those down too."
"I know."
"Why this one?"
"Because a big question can be answered badly and still be answered," Mataon said. "This one can only be answered by producing the form or admitting there isn’t one. There’s no third thing to say. And an office that has never had to write a sentence down in nineteen years is about to have to write one."
The supervisor stamped it, and dated it, and gave him the receipt.
"Sixty days," she said. "From today. That’s the fifteenth of Sylphenia, next year, if it helps you to have the date."
It did help him, and not in the way she meant. He worked it out on the step outside and had to stop for a moment.
Two years. To the day.
Rethe was on the step when they came out, with a cup of something and her coat on, and she was not there by accident.
"You raised a query."
"Word travels."
"Word travels eleven feet in this building and no further. That’s why it travels fast." She drank. "I’m not going to ask you what for. I’d have to remember the answer."
"Then why are you here?"
Officer Rethe looked out at the square for a while, at the stalls and the barley woman and a dog that had got into something.
"Nine hundred examinations," she said. "I’ve been proud of the way I did every one of them and I have never once thought about what the paper was for afterwards. Not once in twenty years. It goes in the box and the box goes to the roll and that’s not my department." She turned the cup round in her hands. "You’ve made that a stupid sentence and I’d rather you hadn’t, and I’m not sure I’d take it back."
"That’s not an apology."
"No. I don’t owe you one. I did my job correctly and you’re going to use it against the people who pay me, and both of those are going to be true for the rest of my life." She finished the cup. "Sixty days. If it comes back and it’s rude, come and tell me. If it doesn’t come back at all, don’t come and tell me, because I’ll already know."
She went back in.
Barni waited until the door had shut.
"Say the whole sum."
"I gave them my name, my work, my children and two hundred years," Mataon said, "and I bought one question that has to be answered in writing."
"Was it worth it?"
"No." He looked at the receipt. "Ask me in fifty-eight days."
[Sarrow — 15 Ravenmark, 334 A.Z. — Day 182]
[Subject’s Query raised. Reference: SQ-334-Sarrow-11.]
[Directed to the office of record. Response required within sixty days.]
[On failure to respond: escalation to the central roll with a note of failure.]
[Level 32 → Level 33]
[Stat points available: +3]
[Basis: converting a loss into standing, and spending the standing on the smallest available question]
[STR +1 · END +1 · WIL +1]
[STR 21 · AGI 19 · END 30 · INT 38 · PER 38 · WIL 43]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 141]
[Sixty days: expires Day 242 — 15 Sylphenia, 335 A.Z.]
[Note: two years to the day since arrival.]
***
They left Sarrow on the sixteenth, going north-east rather than back. There was a second office at Vellow and a third at Marrow Hill, and Mataon wanted to see whether a Subject’s Query looked the same in all three.
Orvek walked without limping. He had taken a bed at the office’s expense four nights running and had stopped writing anything about it.
Barni went ahead and came back and went ahead again, in the way he did when he was thinking and did not want to be looked at.
About midday he fell in at the horse’s shoulder.
"You’ve not said anything about the fourth reason since the step."
"No."
"Are you going to?"
"Not today."
"Good," said Barni. "Because I’ve been carrying a thing for two days and I’d like to put it down, and it won’t fit next to that one."
"Put it down."
"You said you traded a child you don’t have for a child who exists." The ears flattened and came back up. "I want you to know that I have heard a great many men say a thing like that, in a great many rooms, and every single one of them was lying to themselves except you, and it took me two days to be sure, and I am sure."
Mataon walked on for a while.
"Thank you."
"Don’t thank me. It wasn’t a kindness, it was a finding." Barni put his nose down at something in the grass and lost interest in it. "Now. There’s a rider coming up behind us and he’s been coming since the ford, and either he’s very keen to get to Marrow Hill or somebody in the Marches has spent a great deal of money."